Does Dana Rohrabacher Suffer From Multiple Personality Disorder?

​Earlier this month, a San Francisco television station quoted Orange County Congressman Dana Rohrabacher on his outrage that Americans have suffered cyber e-mail attacks from China through Google.

"We have a potential adversary who is the worst human rights abuser in the world, but we have companies that are making enormous profits, short-term profits, by taking our technology over there and improving their capabilities," Rohrabacher told KGO-TV.

What's odd here is that the Huntington Beach Republican has been consistent in denouncing China. (Outside of Orange County at least, Rohrabacher abhors one party domination.) Weeks ago, a newspaper gave him worst prediction honors for arguing in 1999 that the Chinese military would invade the Panama Canal within 10 years.

But while the congressman blasts American corporations for giving away "our technology," it was Rohrabacher who in March 1994 voted to ease restrictions on high tech companies wanting to transfer new, military-related satellite technologies to the communists in China. Proving he hadn't made a bonehead mistake, he voted the same way two months later.

Indeed, as I've previously reported, in an October 1993 letter to the Clinton Administration, Rohrabacher demanded that U.S. corporations be allowed to sell state of the art satellites and communications systems to Red China, which is run by--the congressman has said on numerous other occasions--"evil . . . monsters."

Surely coincidentally, Rohrabacher's anti-China stance softened after getting generous campaign contributions from the management of U.S. companies wishing to profit on satellite sales to China.

Several years later, when confronted with his lobbying letter to the Clinton White House, Rohrabacher's angry reply was classic: Who gave you that letter?